Abstract

People use social media such as Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them. Meanwhile, the public are also concerned with online safety issues, such as how to protect your privacy, how to respect others’ rights, and how to help a friend in need. Mia Garlick, Director of Policy, who co-ordinates safety initiatives for Facebook across the Asia-Pacific region, will share her insider’s views on how to stay safe and smart online and how Facebook can work with local NGOs and contribute to local community development. Mia will be joined by Prof. Paul Yip, Director of HKJC Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong, to meet students, scholars and NGO leaders for the first online safety workshop in Hong Kong.

About the speaker

Mia Garlick, Director of Policy at Facebook. Prior to joining Facebook, Mia was the Assistant Secretary for Digital Economy and Convergence Strategy at the Australian Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Previously she also worked at YouTube and the non-profit Creative Commons. She has a Master of Laws from Stanford Law School and Bachelor of Law and Arts from the University of New South Wales.

Abstract

Alan Turing, a founding father of computer science and famous for his contributions to cracking the Nazi ‘ENIGMA’ codes, died by suicide not long after having been convicted for homosexuality and stripped of his security clearance shortly after World War II. Yet with the development of computers, and the ongoing wave of social and technological innovation and disruption it helped to release, new tools for research have been created, including novel approaches to the study and prevention of suicide. We will discuss a brief overview of the technological changes relevant to this area, and the ongoing developments in areas such as data science, machine learning, and network analysis that are creating the very possibility that Mr. Turing’s “Turing Machines” — better known to us as “computers” — may be the key to understanding health and disease in previously unimaginable ways, and, with great historical irony, to ultimately ending suicide within marginalized communities.

About the speaker

Dr. Silenzio is Associate Professor in the departments of Psychiatry, Public Health Sciences, and Family Medicine at the University of Rochester. He leads the Laboratory of Informatics and Network Computational Studies / Network Science Lab. The LINCS/NetSci Lab focuses on the development of advanced network analytic, machine learning, and related data science methods to public health and biomedical research domains. Dr. Silenzio’s specific research focus is on translational data science applications to study and engage dispersed or otherwise hidden populations for data collection and intervention delivery, in order to develop computational models to inform novel, broadly based preventive approaches to in the areas of suicide prevention and HIV/AIDS. He currently directs research training curriculum of the NIH Fogarty International Center-funded eCapacity program in mobile health and computational social epidemiology at the University of Rochester, which targets scholars from across the Asia and Pacific region.

Abstract

This talk includes two studies tapping into early life risk factors for suicide in young adults in Taiwan. The first study investigated the association of perinatal social factors – maternal age, single motherhood, socioeconomic position, birth order and family size with future risk of suicide; and the second study explored the age of exposure to parental suicide and the risk of subsequent suicide completion in young people. Both study made use of linked data from Taiwan Birth Registry and Taiwan Death Registry. We conclude that early life social circumstances and parental suicide influence future risk of suicide. Factors specific to Taiwanese culture, such as a preference for male offspring and social stigma of suicide, may have influenced gender-specific patterns of risk.

About the speaker

Professor Ying-Yeh Chen is a psychiatrist and a social epidemiologist. She earned her M.D. from Chung-Shan Medical University, Taiwan and got her Doctorate degree from Department of Health and Social Behavior, Harvard University, USA. She has dedicated to suicide research and suicide prevention work with her clinical duties. Her research focuses on socio-environmental influences on suicide and suicidal behaviors; the social factors she evaluates include the mass-media, gendered socialization, childhood environment and access to suicide means. She also conducts a series of studies on suicide attempters, covering topics on media influences, outcome assessment and rationale for method choice. She is translating her academic finding to policy making. She is Taiwan’s national representative for the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP).

Abstract

To date, there have been no effective, broadly applied, comprehensive and sustainable approaches to preventing suicide and risk-related premature deaths in the United States. Rare examples of exceptional programs exist – in the US Air Force for about a decade and in the police force of Montreal, Quebec, Canada – but no one has replicated these results, nor is it clear that they are suitable for dealing with the extraordinary diversity within and between states, let alone an entire country. Preventing suicides and premature deaths – to the extent that there is a substantial reduction in population-level rates – will require systemic, systematically applied and coordinated interventions that, at once, address the needs of both large contributing groups and high-risk individuals; reach across the life course; and are driven by powerful community, health system, and governmental forces. They will require carefully crafted public health initiatives that reach far ‘upstream’ while also dealing with persons on the ‘edge of death.’ While suicide most often is viewed from the perspectives of individuals who have killed themselves, these deaths are drawn from among diverse groups and populations who share many common characteristics. Effective prevention programs must, by necessity, address the diversity of these groups even as it is essential meet the needs of individuals suffering great distress. Suicide prevention must be built as a mosaic; no single piece will convey the entire picture.

The fractured state of suicide prevention efforts reflects the many challenges that must be addressed and barriers overcome in order to build a comprehensive set of approach – what might be called a “full court press” necessary for creating and sustaining the mosaic of efforts required for preventing suicide, attempted suicide, and antecedent risks that are common to these adverse outcomes, as well as other related forms of premature death (e.g., deaths arising from drug overdose). The presentation will consider promoting effective, broadly based coalitions; the opportunities from forging synergies among diverse groups; and the very central role of “culture change” that will be essential to creating and sustaining a powerfully effective suicide prevention movement.

About the speaker

Dr. Caine has served since 1996 as John Romano Professor and Chair, Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester Medical Center and Co-Director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide (CSPS) since its founding in 1998. He has deep experience in the evaluation, management, and aftercare of acutely suicidal individuals, dating to the 1970s. Dr. Caine recently was a member of the Task Force charged with reformulating the National Strategy of Suicide Prevention, a subgroup of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, and now co-chairs its ‘Impact Group’, which will track the effects of the new strategy on national rates of suicide.

Abstract

The suicide risk associated with an individual attribute depends on the context. Eight hypotheses about the interactions between neighborhood composition and country-of-origin, income and socially disadvantaged propositions are proposed based on social support, social comparison and regulation mechanisms. They are tested with a population-based dataset of all 1.4 million adults who lived in the greater Stockholm area in the 1990s. Results from multilevel analyses show that the effects of socio-demographic characteristics on suicide vary with neighborhood composition. The results suggest that neighborhood contexts adversely affect the suicide risk of some while they reduce the risk of the others. The results have implications on policy debates on rising income inequality, increased numbers of migrants and people living in poverty – phenomena that are found in Hong Kong as well as in other countries.

About the speaker

Ka-Yuet Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Her research examines the diffusion of behaviors and non-contagious diseases. She joined UCLA in 2012 after working at Columbia University, New York. Her recent publications focus on the rising prevalence of autism. Her paper “Social Influence and the Autism Epidemic” published in the American Journal of Sociology, won the Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Medical Sociology. Her doctorate research conducted at the University of Oxford focused on the effects of social interactions on suicide. Liu was named a Hellman Fellow (2014-15) for her research on the diffusion of non-medical exemptions to school vaccine requirements in California.

The latte index measures how many lattes can be brought by an hour of minimum wage. It somehow reflects the purchasing power and quality of life of an ordinary worker. We shall illustrate the latte index for Hong Kong and other countries and discuss its implications. The income disparity and social mobility especially among the youth will be discussed. Read More

To improve the public understanding and awareness on the relationship between poverty and mental well-being, a series of seminars is held by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Cheng presented the relationship between giving, earning, and happiness.

To improve the public understanding and awareness on the relationship between poverty and mental well-being, a series of seminars is held by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, the University of Hong Kong. In the fourth and the last seminar of the series, Dr. Chang presented a spatial analysis on poverty and well-being, which examined the geography of poverty and suicide and their association in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s Gini index, which was an internationally commonly used measure of income disparity, increased from 0.476 in 1991 to 0.537 in 2011 according to the Census and Statistics Department (C&SD) based on household income statistics from past censuses. According to the Hong Kong Poverty Situation Report 2012 published by the Hong Kong Government, the poverty line in Hong Kong was set based on the idea of relative poverty and data collected from the General Household Survey. Individuals of a household would be defined as living under the poverty line if the household income was below 50% of the median monthly household income.

To promote the concept of well-being from poverty alleviation in Hong Kong, a series of seminars is held by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, the University of Hong Kong. Read More